I will need to get a laptop in the foreseeable future, and I really want to stick to Linux. However, I may need to be out-of-home for 12+ hours straight in a day. After some research, it seems people are generally not that impressed with battery life on Linux?
The laptop does not need to do anything heavy duty, as I will remote back into my already very beefy desktop back home.
I guess a common solution to this light use case is M2 MacBook if one wants to completely throw battery concern out of the window. Well… let’s just say it’s a love-hate relationship.
If your dGPU supports rtd3 power management, it should (almost) completely power off when not in use. For me the battery life changes a lot: is something like 2 hr vs 10hr battery life with the GPU off, which is very noticeable.
In everything I have seen, there has been no way to turn it off fully (laptop with a GTX 1060). Nvidia x server settings shows no option for a power saver mode, and even Optimus-manager set to integrated graphics only does not seem to have changed it. It seems to continuously idle at the minimum clock speed at around 5W of draw, according to programs like nvtop.